The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Caller ID is a common service offered by most telephone companies which determines and communicates the number/name of the calling party of an incoming call. Many modern telephone and telephony systems routinely offer this service, which is also known as Automatic Number Identification (ANI). Today, many communication systems provide messaging and conferencing services via packetbased networks, i.e., those that operate in accordance with the Internet Protocol (IP).
Telephone call contact centers, such as customer service centers, typically assume that an inbound call or a customer interaction involves a single person identified by the caller's caller ID number. Treatment of the call in the contact center, including priority, queuing, routing, and screen displays or “pops” assumes that a single person is calling. Contact centers do not have an effective way to adjust the treatment of a call when a call or interaction involves multiple people at the same time.